PUBG studio apologizes for server problems, says improvements are on the way

The game is just too popular for its own good.

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has suffered some serious server issues of late that have left players struggling to connect, or to get to the menu screen when they could. We thought for awhile that the problems had been cleared up, but it quickly came to light that our analysis was a little over-optimistic. For now the issues persist, but the PUBG development team says it's doing its best to fix things up.

"First of all, we would like to sincerely apologize to everyone for the recent server issues which resulted in long waits and any inconveniences," it wrote. "Our development team has been continuously upgrading the service architecture to address the increasing concurrent player numbers and tackle any emerging issues. Despite our daily efforts, there were some unexpected issues during peak times and we were unable to resolve some of the issues as fast as we would have wanted to."

The central issue is that the developers anticipated about one million concurrent users during the game's early access period, but that number was surpassed long ago. PUBG Corp, as it's now known, is working to build a new and more robust server architecture, but the concurrent user numbers have grown so quickly—from one million less than a month ago, to 1.5 million last week, and a new peak of nearly 1.7 million two days ago—that it just can't keep up.

The rapid uptick in concurrent users also caused server crashes in Asia: PUBG Corp said the cloud service it was using wasn't able to handle the load, so it tried to compensate by roping in servers from another cloud service, "without sufficient testing." Exactly what went wrong apparently isn't clear yet, but "some servers overloaded, which caused frequent crashes. Our development team is investigating the issue in order to prevent it from happening in the future."

"The entire development team is doing their best to make sure all PUBG players in the world can play PUBG smoothly whenever they want. Again, we would like to sincerely apologize to all the players who experienced any inconveniences due to server problems or connection errors," the developers wrote. "Please rest assured that we have doubled our efforts to improve the quality of the service. On a side note, we have been continuously working on optimization and doing our best to make gradual improvements."